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Hard sci-fi adventures?


tkdguy

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

You've all read my thread about my hard science fiction campaign. All I need now are adventure ideas. I have a few plot hooks' date=' but I can always use more. What adventures would you run? Plot hooks for both military and civilian PCs are good.[/quote']

Here's the layout for how my own hard SF campaign was supposed to go; instead of, y'know, frustration and TPK.

Backstory: Many thousands of years on, humanity has spread to the stars on NAFAL drives. Earth itself has been fairly conservative, so it is enough like now for cyberpunk overtones. Secretly, the very first NAFAL ship was actually a very slow FTL, 'cuz technology actually reached its peak back then. Its wreck be the MacGuffin, and is out there in the outer reaches of the solar system, along with Robinson-like "Icehenge" clues. There's a conspiracy, of course. (It's the Vatican. They're afraid that the birthrate in the NAFAL colonies will fall to Earthlike ZPG/NPG.) The information was buried at the time in a popular virtual reality MMO, which is now lost in the mass and detritus that makes up EarthNet.

The PCs come in just as the poo hits the fan. Someone PC background specific finds the wreck, can't make head nor tails of the tech, but gets a few MMO accounts from the ship library, which they launch on the PC's brain interface when they realise that someone is after them, not realising that the information is only available on the legendary "black" playing level these accounts access.

Adventure Outline

i) Characters suddenly find themselves in the introductory level of an MMO that they don't recognise. They soon realise that they're in deadly danger. When they reach the end of the first level, they are launched back into reality, meet up, figure out who boobytrapped them, track that person down --and witness shadowy assassins From Space (the conspiracy has moved its HQ off Earth) kill the guy, barely escaping their exotic weapons and monsters themselves.

ii) Two lines of investigation are opened up: first in Earth's spacer community (NAFAL commerce happens, but is very slow. Earthbound spacers are an exotic and divided community); second, tracing the original discoverer, who apparently shipped out of Lagrange habitat space. The PCs split up to follow both leads, get into real world and MMO trouble. Those that survive realise that there is no timelag between Earthbound and Lagrange players! Wow! (This is where TPK became inevitable in my campaign, as the PCs obstinately refused to notice that this had happened. In retrospect, I should have just cued them harder.)

iii) By now they should be eager to track down the deadly MMO. This leads to cyberhacking through thousands of years of junk, with deadly Church assassins on their track, and space travel to the original discoverer's destination, a mysterious nearby brown giant system, well known for containing Forerunner artefacts, one of whose artefacts appear to be human. Legend has it that "Red Rover," the first NAFAL to flee Solar tyranny in the longago, made straight for Barnard's Star. With NAFAL, you don't exactly get to make a lot of scenic detours, but this artefact a few tenths of light years out towards Alpha Centauri was evidently made by Red Rover's crew. Too bad Earth and Alpha Centauri are fighting a desultory NAFAL war out in the Big beyond. {This bit subject to revision when we get a definitive account of whether or not A. Centauri has a planetary system.} More MMO adventures can pad out sessions.

iv) Denouement involves reaching the "end" of the black level in the MMO, where the characters finally get access to the server (originally so players could end their black session), and the technical information stashed there. Now they have to reach the wreck of Red Rover itself and fight assorted interested parties for it, get the ship working again,

and

v) do something with it.

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

. . . Kinda like Call of Cthulhu.

 

I've got some story ideas, tkd, but no outright adventures or scenarios . . .

Ideas are good too.

 

Some of mine include escorting/protecting a convoy from one colony to another, trying to regain contact with a remote outpost, diverting a near earth object (and mining it if possible). Battles will also be common after the shooting starts.

 

A couple of ideas I borrowed from magazines are getting data about illegal operations from an old acquaintance and taking down corrupt officials who control a colony.

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

I came up with one plot on my way home. There is a group of settlers opposed to terraforming Mars, claiming humanity will pollute the planet the same way Earth was polluted. Some people in this group are quite fanatical and very militant; they plan to detonate a bomb somewhere in the Valles Marineris settlement. The PCs must find and diffuse the bomb and capture the terrorists.

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

I thought of a new one just this morning. It's a one-shot crossover with the horror genre.

 

Supply ships en route to a lunar or Martian colony were lost, and the colonists were in danger of starving. The PCs are part of the relief effort.

 

They find that some of the colonists have survived, although many perished. The colonists are acting as if they have something to hide. If the PCs investigate, they find out the survivors turned to cannibalism in order to survive. Some of them have grown to like the taste of human flesh, and all of them are determined to keep their secret.

 

The PCs had better watch their backs before they end up on the dinner table!

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

A useful accounting device is the "man-day" or "person-day". If your ship has 30 person-days of food and oxygen, it can support: 30 persons for 1 day (30 / 30 = 1), 15 persons for 2 days (30 / 15 = 2), 3 persons for 10 days (30 / 3 = 10), or one person for 30 days (30 / 1 = 30). By the same math, a ship with 30 person-days of supplies facing a 10 day mission could support 3 persons (30 / 10 = 3).

 

So if the exploration ship Arrow-Back becomes marooned in the trackless wastes of unexplored space and is listed as having 20 person-weeks of life support, it makes it really easy for Mr. Selfish to do the arithmetic and figure that he will survive for twenty weeks instead of one if he murders the other 19 crew members.

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

An occasionally-used complication: that or other aspects of the life support system require the waste generation of more than one person to remain functional. E.g., if the microbe recycle tank doesn't get at least five person-days of poop a day, then the recycling bug population crashes and they generate nothing.

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Guest voodoo54

Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

I know it's not 'Hard Science' but the cheesy schwarzenegger movie Total Recall had some cool plot ideas, especially the whole rebels fighting the evil Mars government thing and the shutting off the air thing.

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

Mongoose's magazine Signs and Portents has had a few Traveller adventures. There's a two-parter that involves psi powers, but that could probably be edited out. There's also one called "The Rescue" that can be used as-is for a hard sci-fi game, about a shuttle crash that damages a mining colony, shutting down their power and life support.

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

Here's a goofy one for you ... I may turn this into a short story someday, but it's a relic of a back-of-the-envelope calculation we did back in grad school. So Extreme Astrophysics Geekdom Warning is appropriate.

 

When a Type II (core collapse, the kind that happens in supergiant stars) supernova happens, the core drops from roughly Earth size down to about 10 km size. The matter neutronizes (the electrons are squeezed into the nuclei and it all goes to neutrons), and about 10^53 ergs of energy are released. 99% of this is released as neutrinos.

 

The star collapses from the center outward, and a shock propagates outward also (though the details are complex and not yet really settled). When that shock reaches the surface, the temperature of that surface goes from roughly 3500 K (for a red supergiant) to something rather high, possibly in the million Kelvin regime, and much of the stellar envelope gets thrown off at speeds of tens of thousands of km/s. That's the visible outburst of the supernova. It takes some time, a few hours, for that shock to propagate from core to surface.

 

The neutrinos, by contrast, escape from the core "promptly". Not all at once ... the matter is too degenerate for that ... but in a pulse that lasts several seconds. But they do escape to space at nearly c.

 

So there's a several-hour interval between the neutrino pulse and when the surface goes from red to blasted. (The observations of SN 1987A confirm this.)

 

Getting speculative, we pushed some numbers around and estimated the lethal radius for the neutrino pulse. The neutrinos can & will scatter electrons off atoms by weak-force interactions, and there's so many of them that will make for a macroscopic zone where the ionizations will occur at a lethal quantity. We got something like 5 AU, which could be off by a factor of 10 either way IMO with as sloppy as we were being. (It pays to remember here that the supernova progenitor star is expected to have a radius of about 1 AU when the bang happens.)

 

As we put it, when the weak force kills you all by itself, you know you were in The Wrong Place.

 

Now, if a ship is in the system and has the instrumentation to anticipate the core collapse in a useful way (which is a HUGE if ... the only thing I can imagine is a near-real-time neutrino spectrometer, because the last nuclear burning stages before core collapse go for no more than a few minutes) then they could be in the system when the bomb is about to go off, and know it.

 

There would be a one place in that neutrino kill radius that would be safe, though. Big Jovian planets have electron-degenerate interiors, which would be opaque to neutrinos. So if you can get your ship into the "shadow" of the Jovian planet's core (which would be a section of a small cone ... we didn't work out how large it would be), you could wait out the neutrino pulse there. Then you'd have a few hours to get the star drive warmed up and get out of the system before the blast wave hit the surface of the star.

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

Interstellar law grants miners who are working on asteroids salvage rights to any vessels that are damaged beyond repair by the asteroid field. Although they must rescue any survivors and take responsibility for their safety.

 

This is quite rare but in one particular asteroid field a number of ships have been salvaged within a short space of time. No survivors were reported. Have some of the miners turned to wrecking? It's up to the party to find out.

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Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

The first war of the solar system took a big toll on everyone. Much of Earth was destroyed, leaving the colonies largely ignored and underfunded. Air, water, and food aren't being transported to the colonies as often as they were, and the colonies aren't sure they can provide enough supplies to everyone. As if the prospect of dying from asphyxiation or starvation wasn't bad enough, the colonists also have to deal with the relics of the war, from debris to ammunition that missed its target. Fortunately, most of the missiles automatically detonated if they found no viable target or ran out of fuel. But railgun shells keep going until they hit something, maybe the dome of a colony. Hell of a thing, getting killed by friendly fire months after the shooting stops.

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Guest voodoo54

Re: Hard sci-fi adventures?

 

Dude' date=' you need 100 Sci-Fi Adventure Seeds by James "Grim" Desborough. I bought the book, it's available online in PDF. But he's a small-time writer, please buy it and don't pirate it. I use it all the time.[/quote']

 

Where do you find this product or do I just need to google '100 Sci-Fi Adventures'?

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